Peter Alexander Ustinov was born in London on February 16th, 1921 to parents of Russian descent – his paternal grandfather, who was exiled for holding to his protestant faith, was a soldier in the army of the Tsar, and his maternal grandfather was St Petersburgballet designer Alexandre Benois.

Ustinov was (expensively) educated at Gibbs Preparatory and Westminster schools, before joining the London Theatre Studio, where he made his stage debut at the age of seventeen, and his screen debut two years later, in a short film Hullo Fame although his first appearance in a feature film was as a Dutch priest in One of our Aircraft is Missing in 1942 His first play, House of Regrets, was produced in the same year – not bad progress for a 21-year-old.

It was during the war that he married for the first time, to Isolde Denham, the daughter of actors Reginald Denham and Moyna McGill and half-sister of Angela Lansbury. This marriage was to last ten years, and produced a daughter, Tamara.

After the war, Ustinov kept busy in all his areas of endeavour, writing scripts and plays, directing, and enjoying growing prominence as an actor. Peter always tended to do best in expansivedramatic roles, (almost ham, of truth be told) receiving an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the insane Nero in Quo Vadis? in 1951. This was the start of a golden period in Ustinov's life. His play The Love of Four Colonels, in which he also acted, ran for two years the West End and transferred to Broadway in 1953, where it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.

In 1954 he married his second wife, a Quebecois actress called Suzanne Cloutier. He starred in another of his own plays Romanoff and Juliet, for which he wrote the songs as well as the script, in the late fifties. It was a huge hit both in London, where it won the Evening Standard Best New Play Award, and on Broadway, where it earned Ustinov Tony nominations both as actor and writer.

In fact, there's barely an area of the arts Peter Ustinov did not receive awards for in the fifties and sixties – he won two supporting actor Academy Awards, for his portrayal of the cowardly slave trader Lentulus Batiatus in Spartacus in 1960 and for his performance as a conman conned in 1964's Topkapi. He received Emmys for TV portrayals of Dr Samuel Johnson and Socrates, and a Grammy for his narration on a recording of Tchaikovsky's Peter and the Wolf. He also became the father of three more children, Pavla, Andrea and Igor. Two of his daughters, Tamara and Pavla have gone on to become actors, with Pavla also writing and directing.

One thing he failed to do in the sixties, however, was to star in the phenomenally successful Pink Panther films – he was the first choice for the role of Inspector Clouseau, but he pulled out, leaving the Mirisch Company to cast Peter Sellers and sue Ustinov.

He was never to experience the same level of success after the sixties, although his claim to have taken on an advertisement for American Express to pay his bill with the company was probably an exaggeration. He divorced from Suzann Cloutier in 1971, and a year later married the woman who was to be his partner until his death, Helene du Lau d'Allemans. Like several of his contemporaries, he moved to Switzerland around this time. During the 1970's he did a significant amount of TV and voice work before taking up the role he played most often on film, and was probably best-known for – Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot – towards the end of the decade. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1975.

In his later years, he earned a considerable reputation as a raconteur and lecturer in many countries, aided by a prodigious talent for languages – he was fluent in French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish as well as English and could get by in Turkish and Greek among others. He was knighted in 1990, became chancellor of Durham University in 1992 and continued write and to work in films and TV right up until 2003. In 1997 he even had a song The night I saved Peter Ustinov written about him by Lauren Christy.

In every area of his life, he seemed to have been well liked and respected. A genuinely amiable and gentle man, he never had a bad word to say about anyone – except critics and 'experts' and then only as a group, not as individuals - and, it seems, nobody had anything bad to say about him.

Peter Ustinov died on 28 March 2004, and is buried in Bursins, Switzerland.